[jerf]

In principle yes, in practice, no. This is one of those places where our developer intuition fails us, and I fully include mine. It feels like it ought to be feasible, even now, but in practice it turns out that there are just so many ways to screw up that optimization without realizing it, with responsibility for it scattered between compilation units (which is to say it isn't even necessarily clearly one things fault, these can arise in interactions), and once it creeps in just a little bit it tends to spread so quickly, that in practice it is not practical to try to exclude the problems. You can't help but write some tiny crack it sneaks into.

This is part of why I'm in favor of things like Rust moving borrow checking into the langauge. In principle you can statically analyze all of that in C++ with a good static analyzer, in practice, it's a constant process of sticking fingers in broken dikes[1] and fighting the ocean. Sometimes you just need a stronger wall, not more fingers.

[1]: https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/finger-in-the-...